Season Simulation
A season simulation plays every remaining fixture 100,000 times over from a fitted match model, then reports the range of points and finishing positions each club landed in rather than a single predicted table.
Why it matters. A projected table published as one line per club hides how much of the order is guesswork. The range tells you which positions are genuinely settled and which are a coin flip.
Figures from xG Stat’s own models, built on Wyscout event data. Updated .
One predicted table is a claim the model cannot support
Most projected tables give you twenty clubs in an order and nothing else. That presentation says the model knows where each club will finish. It does not.
What a match model actually knows is how likely each scoreline is in each fixture. Turning that into a final table means playing the fixtures out, and football played out twice from identical starting conditions gives two different tables.
So the projection plays them out 100,000 times and reports the spread.
How a simulated season runs
Each of the 100,000 runs does the same four things:
- Draw the ratings. Each club's attacking and defensive strength is nudged up or down, because those ratings are estimates from a few dozen matches, not measurements.
- Score every remaining fixture. A scoreline is drawn at random from the probabilities the drawn ratings imply for that specific matchup.
- Add it to the real table. Points already earned this season are the starting point; only the future is simulated.
- Rank and record. The finished table is sorted on points, goal difference then goals scored, and every club's finishing position is tallied.
After 100,000 runs, a club that finished first in 27,000 of them has a 27% title probability. A club that finished between 51 and 80 points in 90,000 of them gets a 51 to 80 range.
The range is the useful part
A narrow band means the model is confident. A club whose 90% range runs from 78 to 88 points is going to be near the top whatever happens.
A wide band means the position is not settled. Ranges around 30 points wide are normal early in a season, and they overlap almost everyone in mid-table.
Overlapping bands mean the order between those clubs is noise. If three clubs all project between 51 and 70 points, printing them 9th, 10th and 11th is an artefact of having to print something. Treat them as tied.
The bands narrow as the season goes on, because fewer fixtures remain to be simulated and the ratings behind them have more evidence.
Promoted clubs are an assumption, not a measurement
A newly promoted club has played no matches in this division. There is nothing to fit its ratings on from top-flight results, so the model starts from an estimate of the squad's strength instead of a league-average placeholder.
Those rows are marked and their bands are drawn as a dashed outline, and the bands are deliberately wider than everyone else's. That extra width is the model saying the prior is information, but not match evidence. Once the club has played, its own results take over and the band narrows like any other.
What the simulation does not model
The ranges cover the variance of football, not the variance of a football club. Every run holds each club's strength fixed from now until May, so none of the following is anywhere in the numbers:
- Injuries, suspensions and managerial changes
- Points deductions
- European and cup fixture congestion
- Clubs easing off once safe, or pushing once there is something to play for
Read the projection as "if the clubs stay roughly what they have been". When that assumption breaks, so does the projection, and the range will not warn you.
Where the ratings come from
The attacking and defensive ratings are the same fit that produces fixture difficulty. It is a statistical match model, fitted on chance quality rather than goals so that a lucky finishing run does not get treated as attacking strength.
Before a season has matches to learn from, the ratings lean on an estimate of each squad's strength. That influence fades to zero as real results accumulate.
The projection is recalculated once a day, immediately after that model is refitted.
The top of the projected table
2026/27 projected
| # | Team | Title | UCL | UEL | UECL | Rel | Proj. Pts | Range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 39% | 91% | 3% | 2% | <1% | 71.2 | 57–86 | |
| 2 | 37% | 90% | 3% | 2% | <1% | 71.0 | 57–85 | |
| 3 | 8% | 60% | 8% | 7% | <1% | 61.6 | 47–76 | |
| 4 | 5% | 47% | 9% | 8% | 2% | 58.9 | 44–74 | |
| 5 | 3% | 40% | 9% | 8% | 3% | 57.2 | 43–72 | |
| 6 | 2% | 27% | 8% | 8% | 5% | 54.2 | 40–69 |
Every fixture still to be played is given a random scoreline drawn from a fitted match model and the finished table recorded, 100,000 times over. Proj. Pts is a club's mean points across those runs, Range is its 90% interval, and each bar is how often it landed in that outcome. Manchester City comes out top on 71.2 projected points.
FAQ
Related terms
See Projected Table across the Premier League
Every player, team and match measured on the chances created rather than the scoreline.